Web 3.0 And The Evolution Of The World Wide Web
The world wide web has been going through a major evolution of sorts over the past few years.In 2004, the term web 2.0 was coined, and it was used to describe the vast array of hosted services, social networking sites, and web applications among other services that had bloomed from that period onward. This trend is continuing well into the present day, as we see more and more content that is linked, dynamic and service oriented. This meant that web pages were no longer static, and that content was not only decided by the website creator; Web sites would change to display data most relevant to the person consuming the information, not the person creating the website.
Web 3.0 is now a term that is being used to describe the ‘semantic web’. This means that it doesn’t only matter what content is displayed and consumed, but whatthe content is about and how it links and interacts with other information available on the world wide web. In essence, the services on the web should be capable of understanding the meaning of the information and all relevant information pertaining to it, and not depend on the knowledge of the end user in making the connection. It uses ‘metadata’ to make semantic connections between pieces of information. The next time you click on a link about a particular topic, the website itself should be able to suggest a list of relevant or related topics based on the one you have queried.
There is still some ground to be covered before the semantic web can become a practical, trustable large scale solution. Because the end user will depend on the web for automating tasks and suggesting relations and providing relevant information, it is very important to have trustable information being provided by the web to the end user. This makes implementation of such a concept a little difficult, but we can expect to see web 3.0 or some form of it evolve soon in the future.
